Primentra vs Reltio — On-premise control or cloud-native scale?

What is Reltio?

Reltio is a cloud-native MDM platform built on graph technology and designed around the Connected Customer 360 concept. Founded in 2011, it was one of the first MDM vendors to go fully SaaS — no on-premise version, no hybrid option, just cloud. That was a bold bet a decade ago. Today it looks like the right one for the market segment they target.

Their platform is built for real-time data processing at scale. We're talking billions of records, ML-based entity resolution, probabilistic matching across customer, patient, and partner domains. Healthcare and financial services are their primary verticals. If a hospital system needs to unify patient records across a dozen acquired clinics, or a bank needs a single customer view reconciled across three legacy CRMs, Reltio is a credible answer to that problem.

Their advertised deployment timeline is 90 days, which is fast by enterprise MDM standards. Pricing is custom and undisclosed, but market reports put medium implementations in the $20,000–$50,000+/year range, scaling well beyond that for large deployments. Their connector library is narrower than Informatica's, but their cloud-native architecture and ML matching capabilities are class-leading for customer data use cases.

What is Primentra?

Primentra is a self-hosted master data management platform that runs entirely on your own SQL Server instance. No cloud dependency, no external services, no data leaving your network. It handles structured reference and master data — entities, hierarchies, domain values, integration views — with an Excel-like editing interface, approval workflows via changesets, and a full audit trail.

Pricing is €7,500/year flat at the founding rate. Unlimited users. No per-seat fees. Most teams are live in under a day. We also include a built-in migration wizard for Microsoft MDS — which matters for anyone leaving SQL Server's now-discontinued MDS feature.

Feature comparison

A side-by-side look at the key dimensions that matter for an architecture decision.

The architecture question: cloud-only vs on-premise

This is not a nuanced distinction. Reltio has no on-premise option — it never did and has never claimed otherwise. For many organizations, that's fine. Cloud-first is the norm in 2026, and most companies are comfortable with SaaS for business-critical data.

But not all of them. Regulated industries, government agencies, and organizations with contractual data residency obligations sometimes cannot move master data to a third-party cloud. It's not always a preference — it can be a legal or contractual requirement. In those cases, Reltio is simply not an available option, regardless of how impressive the feature set is. The evaluation ends there.

Primentra runs entirely inside your infrastructure. The database is your SQL Server instance. The application server runs on your hardware or your private cloud. Nothing leaves your network. That architectural constraint is also its strongest selling point for teams that need it.

Data sovereignty and compliance

The GDPR, HIPAA, and sector-specific regulations around data residency have not gotten simpler. If anything, the compliance burden on organizations handling sensitive reference or patient data has grown. Reltio has invested heavily in security certifications and regional cloud deployment options — but "data in our cloud, in your region" is still not the same as "data in your own data center."

For organizations where the IT or legal team has said data must stay on-premise, Primentra is the simpler path. There's no DPA to negotiate, no cloud security questionnaire to complete, no vendor audit to schedule. Your data team controls the server, the backups, and the access logs from day one.

Customer 360 vs reference data — different problems entirely

This is worth being direct about. Reltio solves a hard problem: taking millions of customer records from disparate source systems — different formats, different identifiers, inconsistent spellings — and resolving them into a single, authoritative view of each customer. That requires probabilistic matching, survivorship rules, and real-time processing. Reltio's graph-based architecture handles this well.

Primentra doesn't do that. We're built for structured reference and master data: the product codes your ERP needs to function, the cost center hierarchy your finance team maintains, the location master that 12 downstream systems pull from. These are records that must be governed, versioned, and approved — not deduplicated. The MDM problem is different in kind, not just in scale.

If you're evaluating both platforms, the first question to ask is: what problem am I actually solving? Customer unification across CRM, ERP, and marketing systems? Reltio. Governance and approval workflows for reference data that downstream systems consume? Primentra.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Reltio does not publish pricing. Custom quotes are the norm, and what you pay depends on the number of records, users, and domains. Market intelligence puts medium implementations in the $20,000–$50,000+/year range, with large enterprise deployments significantly higher. Add a 90-day professional services engagement to that figure.

Primentra is €7,500/year at the founding rate. That's the whole number — unlimited users, unlimited models, no implementation fees, no professional services required. If you have a SQL Server instance and an afternoon, you can be live before the end of the day. There's no consultant to schedule.

The TCO comparison is not particularly close, but it's also not the right comparison to make if your use cases are different. Paying Reltio rates for a reference data problem is like buying a passenger jet to fly the same route a regional carrier already serves. The capabilities are real — just not matched to the need.

Setup and time to value

Reltio's 90-day deployment target is fast for enterprise MDM. Getting a unified customer data platform configured, integrated with source systems, and running match-merge logic correctly is not a trivial project even in the best case.

Primentra is self-service from day one. Install the application on a Windows Server with SQL Server, run the database setup script, log in, and start building your data model. No vendor kickoff call. No professional services prerequisite. The 60-day free trial requires no credit card, so there's nothing stopping you from testing it against your actual data before committing.

MDS migration path

Microsoft removed Master Data Services from SQL Server 2025. If your organization is still running MDS on SQL Server 2022, mainstream support ends in July 2028 — and you'll need to move before then. Our MDS alternatives comparison covers all the main options.

Reltio has no migration wizard for MDS. Moving from MDS to Reltio means a custom data migration project — exporting models, remapping structures, configuring match rules. That's not an unreasonable ask for an organization moving to Customer 360 at the same time, but it adds cost and timeline.

Primentra includes a built-in MDS migration wizard. Run one SQL query against your MDS database, save the JSON output, upload it to Primentra. Your models, entities, attributes, and domain values are imported. Most migrations finish in under an hour. Teams that are replacing MDS with like-for-like functionality — not expanding to Customer 360 — have a direct, low-risk migration path with us. The full MDS migration guide walks through every step.

Choose Reltio if…

• You need cloud-native Customer 360 with ML-based entity resolution and real-time streaming
• Your primary use case is unifying customer, patient, or partner records across multiple source systems
• You operate at enterprise scale — hundreds of millions to billions of records — and need a platform built for that
• Cloud deployment is acceptable or preferred and data residency is not a hard constraint

Choose Primentra if…

• Your data must stay on-premise — cloud storage of master data is not an option, full stop
• You need structured reference data governance: hierarchies, domain values, entities, integration views
• You're migrating from Microsoft MDS and need a direct, low-risk replacement on SQL Server
• Budget and implementation speed matter — flat pricing, no consultants, live in under a day

Verdict

Reltio and Primentra are not really competing for the same customer. Reltio is an enterprise-grade, cloud-native Customer 360 platform. We're a self-hosted reference data platform for organizations that need governed master data on SQL Server. The overlap in the Venn diagram is narrow.

If you arrived at this comparison because someone on your team mentioned both tools, the most useful thing I can tell you is: decide on the architecture first. Cloud or on-premise? That single question will narrow your options before any feature comparison matters. If on-premise is the answer, Reltio exits the conversation. If cloud is fine and your problem is Customer 360, Reltio is worth a serious look — and Primentra probably isn't the right tool.

The honest answer is that different teams have different needs, and both products exist for good reasons. Pick the one that matches the problem you actually have.

Frequently asked questions

Common questions about Reltio and Primentra.

If your data needs to stay on your own SQL Server, start with a free trial — no credit card, no cloud, no consultant required. Try it free →

• No cloud migration — stays on your own SQL Server
• No professional services required — self-service from day one
• No credit card for the trial